Computer generated documents have historically, like their pre-computer counterparts, contained only text. However, during the past 5-10 years, as computer hardware has become more powerful, storage capacities have increased, and presentation software has become more sophisticated, users have begun to introduce images into documents and presentations.
However, finding images appropriate for a particular presentation is often prohibitively difficult. Users can generate the images themselves, but this process requires that the users have advanced facility with an image generation program and the time necessary to produce an image of reasonable presentation quality. Users can use a pre-generated image, but locating appropriate images is extremely difficult and time consuming. Pre-existing images can be modified, but a pixel by pixel modification process is often nearly as time consuming as generating the image from scratch.
What is needed is a mechanism for obtaining pre-existing images and converting them to a format that allows them to be easily modified.